Managing energy, audiobooks and fractured ribs

One of the best things that resulted from my founding of Sprettur a couple of years ago, was that I learned a thing or two about the importance of continuing learning and acquiring new knowledge. A part of that is that we listen to audiobooks quite a bit. As a result, I've listened to 18 audiobooks, most of them with a management or business related focus. A couple of those books have influenced me deeply, the last one to do so is "The Power of Full Engagement"  by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz.
The subtitle of the book says a lot about its content, which is "Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal". For me, this is turning out to be a very fundamental paradigm shift, as I  have been focused on time and project management practices, both on the personal level, such as Getting Things Done, and of course all the Agile processes, such as Scrum. The revelation for me, is that as good as those processes and practices are, the chances are that managing your time better is not what you really need.

It so happened that just over a month ago, I had a little accident and fractured a rib. A friend of mine which had a similar injury not so long ago, told me that week number three would be the worst, apart from the first few days of course. This turned out to be pretty accurate, I was able to attend work until about three weeks after my accident, that I simply had to go home around noon, as I was completely drained of energy. It just so happened that I had downloaded this book the day before, and decided to start listening to it.

One of the statements made in this book, which is common sense when you hear it, but obviously something whose importance is easily forgotten, is that we get our energy from two sources. The food we eat AND the air we breathe. It is this latter half that we apparently take too much for granted, and rarely think about. Now, even with a fractured rib which affects your breathing significantly, I did not think much about breathing (other than how painful it was to take a deep breath) until reading this sentence. And it hit me, that I was obviously taking unnaturally shallow breaths due to the fractured rib, and that was a probable cause of my fatigue. So I decided to experiment with this on myself, and perform a simple breathing exercise described in the book for the rest of the day and the next day. The results were pretty dramatic for me. Not only did I last easily at work until 7pm the next day, but the fatigue I had experienced the last days before was completely gone.

The issue I had was apparently that the pain associated with breathing with a fractured rib leads to shallower breathing than is normal, leading to drained energy and fatigue. As soon as I realized the problem, and performed a simple breathing exercise a few times a day (take a deep breath and exhale slowly, repeat  a few times over a minute), the problem vanished. This result is quite dramatic, which could become my fortune, because this is a lesson I will never forget. I fully believe that the benefit for healthy people is substantial as well, simply from conscious breathing.

Apart from the breathing, there are a lot of good advice regarding proper diet habits, physical and mental exercise, rest and recovery which I am starting to implement. Although a bit early, I am going to say that my energy levels are now (after only 2 weeks of doing this) at the highest level they've been in years, leading to more willingness to do things and higher productivity. I trace this mostly to this book, and I would like to encourage everyone to read it. And, although not much time has passed, and other factors are influencing me, I feel that the results from this paradigm shift are so great, that I will continue to consider this book the most influential I've read, so far.